France Said to Train Rwandans Before '94 Genocide

[onedomino]

These are the guys that tried to prop up Saddam Hussein, want to sell weapons to the Chinese military, and support the PRC policy toward Taiwan. Yet they claim they are America's oldest ally. Who would want these guys as an ally? Tyranny lost a great friend when the Soviet Union fell, but it still has France.

France Said to Train Rwandans Before '94 Genocide
The Associated Press
SATURDAY, APRIL 23, 2005

http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/04/22/news/rwanda.php#

A former French soldier said Friday that he saw French troops training Rwandan militias in 1992, two years before those same civilian militias took a leading role in a genocide in the tiny central African country.

Rwandan officials, including President Paul Kagame, have long accused France of training the militias that helped carry out the 1994 slaughter of about 500,000 people, most of them from the country's Tutsi minority. The genocide was orchestrated by a government of extremists from Rwanda's Hutu majority.

The French government, which had close ties with the extremist government, has denied training Rwandan civilians, and the Defense Ministry refused to comment Friday on the allegations made by Thierry Prungnaud, a former noncommissioned officer in the French Army.

"In 1992, I saw French military members training Rwandan civilian militias to shoot a gun," Prungnaud told France Culture radio. He said he had been sent to Rwanda that year to train the presidential guard.

"I am categorical. I saw it."

The training session took place in a national park closed to the public, according to Prungnaud. He said he was not surprised by what he saw, since he was unaware of the consequences. "To me, it seemed normal," he said.

"The only time that I saw them, there were about 30 militants being taught how to shoot in Akagera park," in eastern Rwanda, an area he said at the time was closed to the public and booby-trapped to keep unwanted visitors away.

Prungnaud said he was able to identify the men as civilians because members of the Rwandan military are always in uniform. He identified the trainers as members of the French Navy's 1st Parachute Regiment.

Although he stayed in Rwanda only for a brief period, he said, "I assume that the training continued."

In February, six Rwandans brought charges of "complicity in a genocide" against the French military at the Army Tribunal in Paris.

In a speech last year commemorating the 10th anniversary of the genocide, Kagame, a Tutsi, accused France of complicity in the genocide, saying the French "consciously trained and armed" Rwandan soldiers and militias and "knew they were going to perpetrate a genocide." The French Foreign Ministry called the accusations "grave and contrary to the truth."

Kagame led the Rwandan Patriotic Front rebels who overthrew the Hutu extremist regime and ended the genocide.

 

[Annie]

These are the guys that tried to prop up Saddam Hussein, want to sell weapons to the Chinese military, and support the PRC policy toward Taiwan. Yet they claim they are America's oldest ally. Who would want these guys as an ally? Tyranny lost a great friend when the Soviet Union fell, but it still has France.

I am not surprised. No European 'power' has the abyssmal record of France in Africa. UK was heavy handed, yet educated blacks. Not so France, they KNEW they were not only superior, but that blacks were MEANT to be lackeys.

 

[nosarcasm]

I ll post a secret memorandum of the Clinton administration
that highlights why it took so long to call it a genocide.

The freedom of information act can be quite handy.

In the secret memorandum it says thay labeling it genocide
means they actually have to do something.

This puts a spotlight on the Sudan dance where
they first tried to avoid that label.

 

[onedomino]

Nosarcasm is correct. The Clinton Administration knew what was happening in Rwanda and chose to do nothing. Clinton's behavior was black ethics and despicable. In this way, the Clinton Administration matched the African darkness of the Bush Administration, which has done nothing about Darfur. Some say, "it's not our fight." But injustice is always America's fight.

Papers Prove US Knew of Genocide in Rwanda
By Rory Carroll
April 1, 2004

http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/03/31/1080544556703.html

US president Bill Clinton's administration knew Rwanda was being engulfed by genocide in April 1994 but buried the information to justify its inaction, classified documents made available for the first time reveal.

Senior officials privately used the word genocide within 16 days of the start of the killings, but chose not to do so publicly because the president had already decided not to intervene.

Intelligence reports obtained using the US Freedom of Information Act show the cabinet and almost certainly the president knew of a planned "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis" before the slaughter reached its peak.

It took Hutu death squads three months from April 6 to murder about 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus and at each stage accurate, detailed reports were reaching Washington policymakers.

The documents undermine claims by Mr Clinton and his officials that they did not fully appreciate the scale and speed of the killings.

"It's powerful proof that they knew," said Alison des Forges, a Human Rights Watch researcher and authority on the genocide.

The National Security Archive, an independent non-governmental research institute based in Washington, went to court to obtain the material.

It discovered that a secret CIA briefing circulated to Mr Clinton, his vice-president, Al Gore, and hundreds of officials included almost daily reports on Rwanda. One, dated April 23, 1994, said rebels would continue fighting to "stop the genocide, which . . . is spreading south".

Three days later the secretary of state, Warren Christopher, and other officials were told of "genocide and partition" and of declarations of a "final solution to eliminate all Tutsis".

However, the administration did not publicly use the word genocide until May 25 and even then diluted its impact by saying "acts of genocide".

Ms des Forges said: "They feared this word would generate public opinion which would demand some sort of action and they didn't want to act."

The administration did not want to repeat the fiasco of intervention in Somalia, where US troops became sucked into fighting. It also felt the US had no interests in Rwanda, a small central African country with no minerals or strategic value.

Many analysts and historians fault Washington and other Western countries not just for failing to support the token force of overwhelmed United Nations peacekeepers but also for failing to speak out more forcefully during the slaughter.

Mr Clinton has apologised for those failures but the declassified documents undermine his defence of ignorance.

On a visit to the Rwandan capital, Kigali, in 1998 Mr Clinton apologised for not acting quickly enough or immediately calling the crimes genocide.

 

[Said1]

Dallaire's book "Shake Hands With The Devil" is probably one of the best documented accounts of what happened in Rwanda. I'd highly recommend it.

Shake Hands With The Devil: The Journey of Roméo Dallaire follows the former UN General during his first return trip to Rwanda 10 years after the genocide, a searing emotional journey in which he confronts the memories that persistently haunt him.

In 1993, Dallaire was thrown into a country with only minimal briefing, leading a force that included ill equipped, poorly trained soldiers, some of whom did not want to be there. Unsupported by UN headquarters, Dallaire and his remaining handful of soldiers were incapable of stopping the killing. He condemns top UN officials, Belgian policy-makers, and senior members of the Clinton administration who chose to do nothing as he pleaded each day for reinforcements and revised rules of engagement. The experience led to Dallaire’s own life tragedy, more than once attempting suicide, as he dealt with the psychological fallout of witnessing a genocide he believes could have been stopped.

Dallaire shares his remarkable emotional pilgrimage back to Rwanda, not only with the documentary crew, but also with his wife, who for the first time experiences the country that changed her husband so dramatically. The documentary is based in part on the best-selling book Shake Hands With The Devil: The Failure of Humanity in Rwanda by Lt.-General Roméo Dallaire, which recently won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Non-Fiction. It was principally filmed in early April 2004, during the 10th anniversary of the genocide.

Link

 

[NATO AIR]

Dallaire's book "Shake Hands With The Devil" is probably one of the best documented accounts of what happened in Rwanda. I'd highly recommend it.

It is an incredibly heartbreaking book. Excellent read, but one of the darkest chapters of our modern history captured in the pain and anguish of one man.

France and the US were both equally responsible for the events that happened in Rwanda,
the French for training, arming and giving diplomatic cover to the Hutu Power terrorists
the US for preventing other nations from taking action to stop the genocide, using deception, lies and blackmail.

America was quite the rogue state under Bill Clinton.

Of course had he not given up on Somalia and dishonored our dead there, Rwanda would never have happened because Hutu Power would have been stopped dead in its tracks.